While we value documentation very much,
it's difficult to keep it up-to-date.
If you find a typo or an error in the documentation please do let us know - ideally by submitting a patch with your fix (see "Patch Submission").

Dancer should be able to install for all Perl versions since 5.8,
on any platform for which Perl exists.
We focus mainly on GNU/Linux (any distribution),
*BSD and Windows (native and Cygwin).

We should avoid regressions as much as possible and keep backwards compatibility in mind when refactoring.
Stable releases should not break functionality and new releases should provide an upgrade path and upgrade tips such as warning the user about deprecated functionality.

The Dancer development team uses GitHub to collaborate.
We greatly appreciate contributions submitted via GitHub,
as it makes tracking these contributions and applying them much,
much easier.
This gives your contribution a much better chance of being integrated into Dancer quickly!

To help us achieve high-quality,
stable releases,
git-flow workflow is used to handle pull-requests,
that means contributors must work on their devel branch rather than on their master.
(Master should be touched only by the core dev team when preparing a release to CPAN; all ongoing development happens in branches which are merged to the devel branch.)

This will create a local branch in your clone named devel and that will track the official devel branch. That way, if you have more or less commits than the upstream repo, you'll be immediately notified by git.

You want to isolate all your commits in a topic branch, this will make the reviewing much easier for the core team and will allow you to continue working on your clone without worrying about different commits mixing together.

To do that, first create a local branch to build your pull request:

# you should be in devel here
git checkout -b pr/$name

Now you have created a local branch named pr/$name where $name is the name you want (it should describe the purpose of the pull request you're preparing).

In that branch, do all the commits you need (the more the better) and when done, push the branch to your fork:

# ... commits ...
git push origin pr/$name

You are now ready to send a pull request.

Send a pull request via the GitHub interface. Make sure your pull request is based on the pr/$name branch you've just pushed, so that it incorporates the appropriate commits only.

It's also a good idea to summarize your work in a report sent to the users mailing list (see below), in order to make sure the team is aware of it.

When the core team reviews your pull request, it will either accept (and then merge into devel) or refuse your request.

If it's refused, try to understand the reasons explained by the team for the denial. Most of the time, communicating with the core team is enough to understand what the mistake was. Above all, please don't be offended.

If your pull-request is merged into devel, then all you have to do is to remove your local and remote pr/$name branch:

git checkout devel
git branch -D pr/$name
git push origin :pr/$name

And then, of course, you need to sync your local devel branch with the upstream:

Since version 1.2, the team has decided to take a step further toward production concerns: Dancer now promises to provide an API-stable and feature frozen release, whose updates will only be about bugfixes and documentation updates.

After some discussion with the core-team members, it has been agreed that the 1.2xx release series will be the first of this kind, and will live as long as 1.3xx lives.

As soon as the last 1.3xx release is mature enough and the core team is happy with, it will be uploaded as the first version of the 1.4xx series, and 1.2xx will become obsolete.

This lets us evolve quickly in our main track (devel in GitHub will contain all the daily work we want to make 1.3xx better) but as well, it lets us assure maintainability for the 1.2 series, as we will probably have to fix a bug somewhere in 1.2 without merging with new stuff contained in the devel branch.

That's why a maintenance branch is added to the repo. To be very clear, this branch is named "frozen", to reflect the idea that the source-code in this branch is not meant to evolve regarding features. It should only contains fixes for bug or documentation updates.

If you want to submit a pull-request to the frozen branch (that means 1.3xx is out and you've found a bug in 1.2xx) you need to base your work on the frozen branch. Use the same procedure explained before, but with the frozen branch.

If you use cpanminus, you can do it without downloading the tarball first:

$ cpanm --reinstall --installdeps --with-recommends Dancer

Dist::Zilla is a very powerful authoring tool, but requires a number of author-specific plugins. If you would like to use it for contributing, install it from CPAN, then run one of the following commands, depending on your CPAN client:

Build the code as it would appears on the final release. The tarball of the new distribution will be present in the root directory of the repository, and a called build/<this_branch>, where this_branch is the current working branch, will also have the product of the dzillification of the code.

Actually, yes there is. You can also branch out directly from the master branch, which corresponds to the code is generated by Dist::Zilla and what is uploaded to CPAN. It won't contain any of the changes brought to the codebase since the last CPAN release, but for a small patch that shouldn't be a problem.

Dancer is intended to be a micro-framework. That means among other things that it should remain lightweight. For this reason we try very hard to keep the dependencies as low as possible. On the other hand, we don't want to reinvent the wheel either.

We not likely to accept a new dependency to the core unless there is a very good reason.

If a patch provides a new feature that depends on a module, the solution is to perform a dynamic loading. Dancer has a class dedicated to that job: Dancer::ModuleLoader. Here is an example of how to use it:

Developer releases are those which include an underline ('_') in the version number. Whenever the devel branch has been merged into the master branch, the CPAN release built must be a developer version (the version number contains a '_').

Before a new release is made, the uploaders must wait for the CPAN testers reports. This is done to make sure the new merge doesn't bring regressions.